Teaching as Poetry

Vera Volkova was born on 31 May 1905 in Russia, the same year as Danish ballet-master Harald Lander, and a hundred years later than the genius both of them had to accommodate their artistic goals to emulate at the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen, August Bournonville. But that was to be, for Volkova, the last station in her life’s long journey. Her parents moved to St. Petersburg when she was quite young.

Essential to Vera Volkova‘s training as a dancer were three Russians; the dancer Olga Spessivtseva, on whom she modelled her own appearance, and her teachers Agrippina Vaganova and, especially, Akim Volynsky (originally named Haim Flechser or Flekser, 1861-1926, who took a great interest in the spiritual development of his young pupil, the beautiful but impoverished Vera Volkova, who always wanted to transcend the mere gymnastics of ballet, both as a dancer and especially in her later years as the teacher of Margot Fonteyn, Erik Bruhn and the very young Nureyev. Neither Volynsky nor Volkova fitted well into the young and robust Soviet state, and while she managed to get away in the late 1920’s, via Manchuria and China, it was her belief that the official explanation of Volynsky‘s death ...